Monkey Boy

Friday

GIVEN HOW MUCH we'd had to drink, I suggested to Marianne that maybe she should get a hotel room, or even stay on the extra bed in my room, instead of driving back to Topsfield. But she insisted she was fine. Plus she had her weekly tennis match in the morning. She promised to call when she got home, but once I was in my room, I fell fast asleep. When I woke this morning, there was a message on my phone from Marianne: "What a fun night, sweet Frank. We'll see how I play tennis with an ice pack on my head tomorrow morning, ha! Please, let's stay in touch. It's almost spring, let me take you canoeing on the Ipswich River."

No messages from Lulú, but it's still early, barely eleven. I'd meant to save half of this giant oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie for later in the day because I always get hungry at the nursing home and there's nothing I ever want to eat there, but I've just taken the last bite. I look around at the other customers in this techie-seeming café having their healthy breakfasts and coffees, so many fresh-faced, casually stylish young women, and, unusually for Boston, not all of them white, and doubtlessly all highly educated and knowledgeable about ways of life I don't have an inkling of.

I might as well get going. I'll walk all the way back to South Station, maybe swing past the Congress Street Bridge, too, pulling along my wheeled suitcase, knapsack over my shoulders, gym lock muffled inside a pair of socks, and carrying the tin of French butter cookies inside its pretty shop bag. The exercise and chilly Atlantic air will do me good, but my bad knee aches like it's a little hungover too. So what about last night? I think Marianne and I both got from it what we'd wanted. She was still hurt, after all these years, by what Ian and so many of our classmates had done to her, from one day to the next shattering everything she'd understood and trusted about her world and who she was in it. She'd wanted to talk to me because we'd been close back when it happened and she knew that I'd been hurt by it, too, and that at least I'd be interested. There are people who think, Oh come on, that was adolescence, how can you not be over it? They're like the people who say, Who cares what happened in faraway tiny Guatemala all those years ago now, why do you make such a big deal out of it? I don't like people like that. So why shouldn't Lexi talk to her shrink about what it did to her to watch Bert beating me up all those years, if that's what she thinks she needs? Who am I to dictate what should and shouldn't leave a mark? My walking pace actually quickens, I feel hyped up to tell Lexi and to apologize for having been nasty about it before.

Last night with Marianne I got to confess something I'd kept silent about for over three decades, and the way I'm feeling about it this morning, it's like I had a requited high school love after all. So I can go back in time and start my romantic life all over, fast-forwarding to now: a man confident since adolescence in his ability to inspire love, who knows what to do with it. Some people passing on the sidewalk glance suspiciously at a grown man laughing out loud to himself, like maybe he's about to pull an axe out from under his coat, but others genuinely smile, what is it that makes them react so differently?

Exactly out there, past the far side of Fort Point Channel, on a sun-scorched field by Logan airport, at the start of my senior year of high school, trying out for varsity football, we had a late August preseason scrimmage against the East Boston High School Jets. Just a few plays after having been sent in as a sub at cornerback, I twisted my body to wave at a pass fluttering wide of its targeted Jet, my cleats caught in a withered clump of turf, and I fell. I got up, hopped around on one leg, limped to the sideline, and my football career was over. I've never understood how it was decided in the doctor's office to put me in a cast instead of operating, whether it was the decision of the doctor or my mother or both. The doctor who treated my knee and helped screw it up forever spoke in a heavy German accent. With one strong furry hand clamped around my thigh and the other grabbing my lower leg, he swiveled it side to side from the knee, and loudly singsonged in his cranky voice: Loosey Goosey, Loosey Goosey. Over the years, Herr Doktor said, he'd treated scores of mangled boys from our football team, and several times during the examination, as my mother looked on, he referred to Coach Tyree as a butcher, emphasizing the word "butcher" with such vehement contempt that he sounded like one of those comical Nazi commandants on television, Ach, ist a butcher! I had the impression the doctor was trying to impress my mother in some manly competitive way, cutting Coach Tyree down to size.

Having my leg in a cast that fall of senior year kept me at home after school, crucial in helping me earn the grades I needed to have a chance to get into a decent college. Practically from one day to the next, I learned to assert my will and use my brain in ways I never had before, paying attention in class, studying, doing homework. After Yolandita left to marry Richard the Vietnam War vet and Sears manager, Carlota Sánchez Motta, a Mormon girl from Guatemala who had a relative who was friendly with Abuelita, came to live with us and to go to our high school. Of course I never would have let anyone hear me speaking Spanish to Carlota at school, just as I never would have drawn that kind of attention to myself by speaking Spanish back in tenth-grade Spanish class. But at home, whenever Carlota spoke to me in her imperfect English, I insisted on answering in my imperfect Spanish, until finally one day she fell silent and looked at me with a hurt, flummoxed expression. You have a whole high school to practice your English with, I told her, but I can only practice Spanish here. Her eyes were like two full black moons of distress rising up from behind rounded, slightly pockmarked brown cheeks, and she exclaimed, Oh, Frankie, how did I not think of that? Here we will only speak Spanish, I promise! After that, when she spoke in Spanish, I answered in English. Ay, que malo eres, she said, turning and walking away. Carlota, I'm sorry, I piped after her, I was only kidding around, Carlota, perdón! Por favor, perdóname!

That same fall, after she'd been the Latin American Society of New England's most dutiful rank-and-file member for two decades, my mother was elected its treasurer. The society regularly hosted literary events in its philanthropic Boston Brahmin brownstone in the Back Bay, and it was Mamita who told me that Latin American literature had become such a big deal in the world that it was called a Boom. When Carlos Fuentes came to give a lecture at the society, she sat next to him at the luncheon, they talked about Jorge Negrete, and Fuentes even sang a snatch of the song that goes: qué lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido, and Mamita joined in. She loved to sing despite her tuneless little voice; ever since she'd stood too close to exploding birthday firecrackers as a little girl, she'd been deaf in one ear. The urbanely affable Argentine MIT professor who was the Latin American Society's president and my mother's close friend was also a friend of Jorge Luis Borges and gave him science advice for his stories. That year it seemed like my mother was always carrying around a Carlos Castaneda book about Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian peyote shaman. The Teachings of Don Juan was a famous Boom book, too, I thought. The first Boom book I read was No One Writes to the Colonel, a bilingual paperback edition Mamita used in one of her Spanish classes. On the new-books shelf at the public library I found Heartbreak Tango by Manuel Puig, set in a small town in Argentina whose mean-spirited mediocrity, along with the secretive sexual misbehaving of its adolescent girls, resembled our town even more than the New England one in Carrie did. Mamita always said that Gabriel García Márquez's books brought back to her the sad pueblo our family was from on Abuelita's side, situated among the sugar and rubber plantations and ranch lands of the Costa Sur. That spring, the ophthalmologist whom Carlota met at my cousin Denise's wedding in Framingham told her she reminded him of his favorite female character in One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wouldn't say which one and challenged her to read the book and figure it out.

During those first weeks when Carlota was living with us, my father managed to keep his temper in check, but soon enough he was back to his ranting goddamned this, goddamned that along with his bawling: Yoli Jesus Christ Almighty get off my goddamned back. Sometimes Lexi had tantrums too. I wondered if Carlota was sorry she'd come to live with us.

That fall I discovered that I didn't really have friends anymore. Some had dropped me even before senior year or drifted away, or, like Space, they'd already disappeared into their own lonely disasters. Some had serious girlfriends or lovers. I hadn't even tried to kiss a girl since Arlene Fertig.

When Carlota had finished cleaning up after dinner, we'd sit at the Formica kitchen table doing homework after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep. She'd lean over whatever textbook she was studying or the notebook she was writing in, her concentration a plumb line, silky black hair curtaining her face, her smooth, brown forearm...